Saul Bellow Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.

  Saul Bellow

  Ideas, People, Insightful

  Saul Bellow, Gloria L. Cronin, Ben Siegel (1994). “Conversations with Saul Bellow”, p.95, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  14 Copy quote

• Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out - a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes - like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much.

  Saul Bellow

  Pain, Betrayal, Cutting

  33 Copy quote

• In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings - about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes - and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.

  Saul Bellow

  Emotional, People, Feelings

  Saul Bellow (2016). “It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future”, p.138, Odyssey Editions

  25 Copy quote

• All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!

  Saul Bellow

  Imagination, Accomplishment, Enough

  29 Copy quote

• The spirit knows that its growth is the real aim of existence.

  Saul Bellow

  Real, Growth, Spirit

  Saul Bellow (2015). “Mr. Sammler's Planet”, p.152, Odyssey Editions

  7 Copy quote

• I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.

  Saul Bellow

  Writing, Long, Ordinary

  Saul Bellow, Gloria L. Cronin, Ben Siegel (1994). “Conversations with Saul Bellow”, p.138, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  12 Copy quote

• The two real problems in life are boredom and death.

  Saul Bellow

  Real, Two, Boredom

  6 Copy quote

• We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.

  Saul Bellow

  Book, Next

  12 Copy quote

• I don’t actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I’m beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.

  Saul Bellow

  Soul, Culture, Input

  Saul Bellow (2001). “Collected stories”, Penguin Group USA

  4 Copy quote

• The stillness in art characterizes prayer, and the eye of the storm.

  Saul Bellow

  Art, Prayer, Eye

  11 Copy quote

• ...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.

  Saul Bellow

  Struggle, Sleep, Fighting

  16 Copy quote

• I am more stupid about some things than others; not equally stupid in all directions; I am not a well-rounded person.

  Saul Bellow

  Stupid, Wells, Well Rounded

  5 Copy quote

• I love solitude, but I prize it most when plenty of company is available.

  Saul Bellow

  Inspirational, Solitude, Company

  "Saul Bellow: Letters".

  8 Copy quote

• I am a phoenix who runs after arsonists.

  Saul Bellow

  Running, Phoenix, Arsonists

  56 Copy quote

• Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

  Saul Bellow

  Real, Boredom, Social

  Saul Bellow (2008). “Humboldt's Gift”, Penguin Classics

  15 Copy quote

• Art -- the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos -- art, not politics, is the remedy.

  Saul Bellow

  Art, Mean, Soul

  6 Copy quote

• Live or die but don't poison everything.

  Saul Bellow

  Poison, Dies

  Saul Bellow (1976). “Herzog”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

  9 Copy quote

• The secret motive of the absent-minded is to be innocent while guilty. Absent-mindedness is spurious innocence.

  Saul Bellow

  Secret, Innocence, Guilty

  1987 More Die of Heartbreak.

  17 Copy quote

• The first undressing of two lovers is a most special event.

  Saul Bellow

  Two, Special, Events

  16 Copy quote

• All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

  Saul Bellow

  Marriage, Writing, Aphrodisiac

  "Dailer's Choice" by Harriet Van Horne, The New York Magazine, Volume 10, No. 13, p. 80, March 28, 1977.

  12 Copy quote

• I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.

  Saul Bellow

  Aging, Vain, Glad

  "In Bellow's shadow" by Jamie Allen, www.cnn.com. November 27, 2000.

  19 Copy quote

• Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.

  Saul Bellow

  Dangerous, Strict, Seriousness

  Saul Bellow (2015). “Ravelstein”, p.1, Penguin

  30 Copy quote

• In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

  Saul Bellow

  Country, California, America

  20 Copy quote

• I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.

  Saul Bellow

  Art, Achievement, Chaos

  In George Plimpton 'Writers at Work' (1967) 3rd series, p. 190

  7 Copy quote

• The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.

  Saul Bellow

  Art, America, Poetry

  Saul Bellow (2015). “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction”, p.149, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

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